The casino wave

When I visited Monte Carlo, Monaco a few weeks ago I ran into an old colleague, we had been on the same card counting team almost twenty years ago, we sat in Havana Café and discussed old memories, she had spent all the time since we put the Last time at the Blackjack tables in Atlantic City, USA, while I was spending my time at the European casinos. After half an hour of old memories, we glide back to how the casino world has developed since it went online.

A business, an online world generally makes things easier, but the question is whether it has really made it with the business of online gambling. To begin with, it is not so easy to protect yourself against credit card fraud and rigged games and to kill a myth, as I write this (December 2005) there is no authority whatsoever to control online casinos.

But that’s not important. What you really should be wondering is whether gambling is more available than it was fifteen years ago, when the world of online casinos began to develop. Of course, more people than ever are gambling, but is it really due to the dot-com industry? What I mean is that gambling has always been available to everyone and that regardless of the fact that there are really few “real” casinos in Europe, there have always been exceptions to the no gambling laws, everything from restaurant casinos in Germany. to Jack Vegas slot machines in Sweden, and Monte Carlo is never too far away.

I mean the fact that you can always, and always can, gamble, but when the business of online gambling came about, people were doing it first. Politicians around the world explain this with the fact that the easier it is to bet, the more people bet.

I, who have been in this business for twenty years, know that that is not the answer. I’d say this is actually proof of how easy humans are. The reason I disagree with politicians is, of course, because the online gambling business never did so well until early 2003, 13 years after the first casino went online. There, the reason more people play than ever is not because of availability, it is because of the online marketing methods they are using.

And then the press should have its share of criticism, when suddenly it became great to earn a living from poker, then all the kids sat behind the computer for hours, trying to turn professionals.

But the ones who cannot be blamed enough are the politicians around the world with their disgusting morals. If casinos had not been banned around the world, there would be no online casinos, a censorship of these casinos would of course be restrictions on our democracy, but something must be done, and since politicians refuse to give the people the right to gamble in a real casino without the risk of having their credit card stolen or without the risk of rigged games, they all refuse to let casinos in, but if you want to become poor and rigged, do the same as everyone else, go with the casino wave.